TAR BABY

Tar Baby (1981) is set on an imaginary Caribbean Island and involves the love affair between Jadine, an educated black model, and Son, a handsome drifter. They meet at the estate of Valerian Street, who is accompanied by a fragile wife, Margaret, and their black servants, Sydney and Ondine Childs. The novel portrays Valerian Street, the Candy King, who after being retired at age 65, buys a tropical island, called L'Arbe de la Croix. The domestic group at L'Arbe de la Croix is a divided microcosm of American society.i Valerian spends most of his time in the greenhouse nursing cognac and the flowers of his native Philadelphia. His wife, Margaret, plans to travel to her son right after the Christmas holidays. Sydney and Ondine are happy because their niece, Jadine, comes back from Europe, and they are together like family. Slow to realize his presence, a stranger, Son, who falls in love with Jade (the sleeping beauty), is hiding in the Streets house. Upon his first appearance, when found in Margaret's closet, Son smells like an animal. Despite this, Valerian invites him to live in the guest room. Through Valerian's sponsorship, Jadine is molded by the white culture. Margaret, on the other hand, represents the "Principal Beauty of Maine," attracting Valerian when he has seen her red hair and white skin on a Polar Bear float. The novel is based on a legend about an animal character in a fable tale, "Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear" by Robert Roosevelt, in which the character Brer Fox makes a doll out of a lump of tar, hiding it by the road to entrap his enemy Brer Rabbit. When Br'er Rabbit comes, he addresses the Tar Baby amiably but receives no response. Offended by what he perceives as the Tar Baby's lack of manners, Br'er Rabbit punches it and becomes stuck. The more he struggles with it, the more he is entangled in it. While Br'er Rabbit is stuck, Br'er Fox

ponders how to dispose of him. Br'er Rabbit pleads not to be thrown in the thicket. Then, an animal suggests throwing the rabbit into the thicket to die. The rabbit pleads for her life, and then it gives a whoop and bounds away, calling out the other animals: "This is where I live!"ii Tar Baby may be influenced by the American Cherokee "Tar Wolf" story, widely popular among Native American tribes, and by the African folklore Ghana. iii The term Tar Baby implies many connotations. In African folklore, gum, wax, or any sticky material refers to someone who is caught in an intricate situation that can be solved only by separation. Tar Baby also refers to the idea that a problem gets worse the more one struggles against it. This connotation becomes part of the U.S. culture. White Americans use the term Tar Baby to mock African American civil rights leaders.iv It is also used as a derogatory term for black people in the US; as a result, some people suggest avoiding the use of this term in any literary context. In an interview, Morrison says about using the term Tar Baby in her novel:
Tar Baby is also a name, like 'nigger,' that white people call black children, black girls, as I recall. At one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. It held together things like Moses' little boat and the pyramids. For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together.v

Morrison gives the term tar baby a positive connotation. For her, tar baby means a black woman who can hold things together.vi She uses the term as a pejorative and reclaims it, in the sense that Jadine makes an inadequate tar baby, since she is not the black woman who can hold things together in the sense of being a nourishing woman for her family and community, and since she is too concerned with forging her own individualistic career path.vii It is only at the end of the novel, Son describes Jadine as tar baby who holds together the worlds of the whites and blacks, youth and dead ancestors. In the Foreword, Morrison declares that tar is not only the strange, silent center, but the sticky mediator between master and peasant, plantation owner and slave.viii Yet, the

novel is not only about the relation between white masters and black slaves (racial discrimination), it is also about the relationship between men and women (gender discrimination); therefore, tar baby is dressed as a female. The novel explores three kinds of relationships: the relationship between blacks and whites, within families, especially between parents and children, and between black men and women.ix However, Morrison is a complex writer, whose works weave difficult motifs. Tar Baby has a complex plot. It can be divided into three subplots: (1) Isle Des Chevaliers or Larbe De La Croix, which flashbacks the past, Islands ghosts, which focuses on Valerians greenhouse, Son and Jadines romantic love, racial and family tension, and food conflicts; (2) Dominique focusing on Therese and Gideons home, and dinner with Son; and (3) Son's and Jadine's trip to U.S.x Tar Baby is a departure from Morrisons other works in a number of ways. It is the first of her novels, in which white characters are central to the plot. In the novel, characters do not form a united group, while Morrisons earlier works describe a cohesive African American community. Nature also plays a key role in this text, serving as a chorus that watches the events unfolding on the island.xi The novel consists of 10 chapters with a foreword, a prologue, and an epilogue. The character's development is examined through the past, for instance, the mythical past of the Isle des Chevaliers, is similar to the historical past of slavery and the Middle Passage in Beloved. A third person narrator relates the novel. Characters often become secondary narrators, speaking in the first person.
xii

Morrison divides the narration into multiple voices, so she treats time not chronologically but circularly as a multilayered dimension. Flashbacks and flashforwards are narrated. xiii Time becomes more like

circular African time than linear European time, as the novel proceeds in both a chronological direction and a circular or spiral redoubling.xiv Characters' mental time is both interfused with and separated from the external time of events: "[I]nner time is always transforming outer time through memory" and "outer time transforms inner time"xv The novel opens with a verse said by Saint Paul: For it hath been declared unto me of you, /my brethren, by them [which are of the house] of Chloe, /that there are contentions among you (1Cor.1:11 KJV). This verse urges to end contentions and discrimination. Similar to Saint Pauls message, Morrison's novel addresses blacks and whites, men, and women, young and old. The prologue harangues a message that everyone has a certain position to occupy and a specific function to achieve, and that nobody is better than the others. Weak things are found to produce mighty things, and base things are found to bring glory to the world. Hence, blacks are not lesser than whites. In the Guardian, Morrison criticizes racial discrimination in the USA, saying: In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate. xvi Through her fiction, Morrison intends to present problems without their answers. Tar Baby does not have a clear conclusion. As Barbara Christian writes, "[It is] a simple story becoming increasingly complex, mythic, beyond solution, yet teaching me a lesson I needed to know. xvii In the "Foreword," Morrison explains the title of her novel, and the process of writing fiction and storytelling. She divides the process of narrative creation into four stages: sounds, pictures, performance, and cadence. Words are signifiers that signify sounds/pictures and motion of the world outside the literary text.xviii In this case, words that are signs of a certain system are able to signify signs that belong to different systems. It is not only the "sound that [breaks] the back of words," (A "Foreword," to TB, xi) giving voice to unspeakable occurrences in language, but pictures and motion can be spoken in

language as well. In that way, Morrison's writings negate Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adornos assumption that music is not language, that it does not form a system of signs, and that words bear reference to things in the world. If music is self-referential and does not denote anything, then, a translation of literature into music fails. Musicologists think that the only way to make sense of music is by associating sound with experiences, which are communicated verbally. xix Hence, as a postmodern novelist, Morrison's novel foregrounds its intersexuality, the shaping of the novel's meanings by other audible-visual-motional texts:
All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen- for silence, infection, rhythm, rest. Then comes the image, the picture of the thing that I have to invent .There is performance, too:" zzz went the saw," accompanied by gesture. And cadence:"Old man Simon Gillicutty, caaatch me. I need to use everythingsound, image, performanceto get at the full meaning of the story. (A Foreword to TB, xi)

To read Morrison's novels, a reader needs to listen to sounds, see the images, and feel the movements lurking behind the text. All the formal elements of Morrison's novel (such as the length of scenes, the structure of the novel, number of dialogues, the repetition of motifs,) are arranged rhythmically. In other words, themes, images, and symbols are repeated rhythmically. The characters are moving as if they were patterns of musical movements contrasting and complementing each other, similar to stressed and unstressed syllables in accentual verse. In the "Foreword," Morrison believes that one must surrender to the vernacular language of one's culture. John Brenkman argues that during the late 1970s and 1980sa period of political uncertainty following the civil rights and black power movements of the previous two decadesAfrican American writers addressed the problem of the relation between literature and vernacular culture, the writer and the masses.xx

This problem of representation pushes writers to overreach the vernacular communities, and to address a generalized national public. Morrison argues, Language as power, language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. xxi She employs African American vernacular language and folklore to foreground her concern with subversion both in the language itself and in narrative structure through the enactment of comic verbal exchanges and various abusive languages. xxii She uses nonverbal language to invoke the character's memory, and describe lovemaking.xxiii In Tar Baby, characters are African masks that are regarded as the dwelling of the spirit. African masks represent a spirit; it is strongly believed that the spirit of the ancestors possesses the wearer.xxiv Making her one of the mask characters, Morrison depicts herself as a child, dancing with her grandmother and going into deep trance. During this state of mind, she communicates with her ancestors and becomes capable of understanding their language. Without this ceremony, the child would never grow as a mature author. Knowing the ancestral history is a prerequisite to be an intelligent writer, the narrator believes that one must surrender to the language of one's culture, claiming that the original source of fiction is drawn from African American folk and oral traditions.xxv The child-author's grandmother functions as a shaman or an interpreter. The dancing ceremony leads up to the creation of the novel, Tar Baby, and brings forth messages of wisdom from old ancestors. Nevertheless, the messages from old ancestors are grunted utterances that are difficult for the reader as well as the young generation to understand; therefore, grandmother as an interpreter accurately deciphers the meaning of the message to the childauthor and to the reader. Morrison presumes that Tar Baby is a fruit of her greatgrandmother, who has been "intemperate, brimming with hard, scary wisdom," her grandmother, who has been "a secret treasure whose presence anchored the

frightening enchanted world," her mother, who has been "gifted, gregarious, burdened with insight," and the child, who has been no more than a "sponge" (A Foreword to TB, iv), in comparison to the wisdom and experiences of old ancestors. The novel deals with diverse kinds of love, such as passionate, companionate, and parental-filial love. It commences with a nameless figure plunging into the sea, believing that he can gain freedom. There are symbolic signs that he is romancer. The ship from which he dives bears the name Konigsgaarten that means the king of the seas, and the port town that waits its docking is the Queen of France. The last image of coupling is the marriage flight of a queen soldier ant and her chosen consort. Morrison brilliantly describes lovemaking and passionate scene.xxvi Valerian loves a girl, whom he has met in the Snow Carnival Parade, and marries her. Their relationship is love at first sight: "The moment he saw her something inside him knelt down" (TB, 16). She possesses the standards of western beauty like a rosy-cheeked girl holding on to one of the bear's forefeet like a bride, and you are beautiful. Slim. Trim. Distingue (TB, 16, 31). After a nine-year childless marriage, their love turns into dislike. After getting divorce, Valerian meets the Principle Beauty of Maine, who has been "so young and so unexpectedly pretty ," "all red and white," with "blue eyeswith hair the color of the saffron and the skin of the north," and whose face has a touch of "peace and hope on the face of this beautiful woman" (TB, 47,55,56). Valerian marries Margaret, who becomes his "snowy Valentine Valerian" (TB, 47).The second marriage is no better than the first one. Both marriages are incompatible, because Valerian looks for only physical beauty, ignoring the inner beauty of the soul and mind. Morrison studies love and beauty in relation to racism. Along with the idea of

romantic love, she introduces physical beauty (the most destructive ideas of human thought), demonstrating that beauty is socially and culturally constructed. She argues that both love and beauty are originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.xxvii With her "sunset hair and milk-white skin" (TB, 83), Margaret possesses the western standards of ideal beauty. Ironically, Valerian admits that "beauty is never enough," to understand her true self, or to dig deeply beneath where her Margaret-hood lay in the same cupfaceless" (TB, 83). Morrison recognizes that if whiteness becomes a standard of beauty, the value of black beauty may diminish and change into ugliness. The novelist does not portray blackness positively in her novel; instead, she focuses on the damage the black women characters suffer in a racialized society. xxviii For Morrison, while the images of blackness can be fearful and desirable, whiteness is meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, and implacable. xxix Both Jadine and Margaret possess unhinging beauty. Feeling jealous of Margaret, Jadine, in a stream of consciousness, describes Son as black beauty: "He wants me. He's crazy and beautiful and black and poor and beautifulbut he doesn't want you. He wants me and I have the fingerprint to prove it"(TB, 186). Kathleen Brown, et al., argue that contemporary beauty ideals impose a beauty imperative on American women. xxx This beauty imperative affects all women, regardless of race or class. In Foucauldian terms, beauty ideals turn women into docile bodies that serve the needs of patriarchy and capitalism. xxxi However, responses to beauty ideals vary across cultures.xxxii Louise Roth and Rachael Neal claim that the universal standards of beauty must be adopted to offer more attainable beauty ideals; that is, the standards of beauty must be democratized across racial-ethnic groups, regardless of differences in the ethnic backgrounds.xxxiii

Love transcends race line. Such love that pays no attention to skin color is brotherly (Philia). Margaret is a prejudiced white woman and a veritable stereotype; her relationship with her black servants is so friendly that she consorts them instead of giving them orders. For Margaret, black folks are as good as the white folks. Dissatisfied with his wife, Valerian quarrels about the growing intimacy between his wife and her servants. In addition, Joyce Hope Scott suggests that Morrison refigures the mythic fall from the Garden of Eden as a parallel myth to the African American animal fable of Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby.xxxiv Morrisons own view is that the fall operates to redeem the sinfully innocent inhabitants of LArbe de la Croix. It is Son, the transgressor, who can set free the spiritually bound Valerian. Ironically, Valerian and Margaret wait for their son, Michael, to visit them. It is not their son, Michael, who comes, but rather Americas own native Son.
xxxv

Valerians love to Son

transcends race line, because Son unconsciously compensates Valerians nostalgia for his absent son. Contrary to brotherly love between masters and servants, there are many contentions such as that of race. Therese never acknowledges the presence of the white Americans. As John Irving aptly puts it, Morrison uncovers all the racial fears felt by whites and blacks alike. Prejudice exists between whites and blacks in the Streets house; between the black people and the local populace.xxxvi Throughout African American history, black men are seen as barbarous animals who can rape a white girl. xxxvii The white people of the house feel superior, and later are threatened by the blacks. When Son is discovered in Margarets bedroom closet, she grows hysteric. Because he is a black man in her closet, she thinks he intends to rape her and masturbates on her clothes and shoes. Referring to Maslow's Pyramid,

Son admits a scientific fact that he does not hide in the closet to rape a woman, and that his need for sex comes after his need for food and security: "Sex is hard when you're starving"(TB, 198). Furthermore, parental-filial love is an important issue in Morrisons fiction. Maternal love may hurt. Many hysterical mothers brutally abuse their children.xxxviii "[M]others however beautiful were not fair. No matter what you did, the diaspora mothers with pumping breasts would impugn your character. And an African woman could discredit your element"(TB, 287). Nearly 95 percent of American parents abuse their children. Mothers abuse children 3 times more than fathers do, and biological mothers commit 40.5% of child abuse. The highest measurements of child abuse are recorded among white Americans, 50.2% are African Americans, 14.5% are Hispanic, 2% are Native Americans, and 1.3% is Asian Americans.xxxix Although literature reinforces that there is no love greater than that of a mother to her children, Morrison portrays the opposite in Tar Baby to show the decaying of values and emotion in the postmodern world when mothers who hurt their children become natural, and when waste becomes the principle order of the universe. A mother's love is supposed to be beyond explanation. It is made of deep devotion, sacrifice, and pain. It is endless, unselfish, and enduring. Nothing can take that love away. While mother is supposed to be the chief nurturer of the child, Margaret becomes a sadist child abuser. She abuses her infant, sticking pins in his back, and burning him with cigarettes while he is just a "wee wee little bitty baby"(TB, 209). She states,
Anything was better than knowing that a pretty (and pretty nice) sober young woman had loved the bloodying of her own baby. Had loved it dearly. Had once locked herself in the bathroom, a pair of cuticle scissors in her hand, to keep from succumbing to that love.

(TB, 231)

Ironically, maternal love becomes absurd. Margaret is a mother with a narcissistic hysteric personality, who abuses her child, because of her need for admiration and empathy. Known as the queen of beauty, Margaret wants to be the sole subject of admiration and love. Another interpretation is that she, as a sexually abusive mother, may be over-protective, feeling her child not just a child, but she has a rightful ownership over him. An abusive mother uses her child in an attempt to fill her own unmet emotional needs, such as the need to feel loved, secure, and protected. The recipe for emotional abuse is that if the mother does not adequately manage her own life as a child, she is expected to control her child as compensation. To fill her unmet need, the white mother manipulates her child into performing what she perceives as acts of love:
She was outraged by the infant needfulness. There were times when she absolutely had to limit its being there; stop its implicit and explicit demand for her best and constant self. She could not describe her loathing of its prodigious appetite for securitythe criminal arrogance of an infant's conviction that while he slept, someone is there; that when he wakes, someone is there . So she told him that part that was palatable: that she could not control herselfwhich was true, for when she felt hostage to that massive insolence, that stupid trust, she could not help piercing it. (TB, 236)

In this a novel, parents and foster parents fail their own children, even with the best intentions. The Streets fail to give their son Michael the nurturing love he needs. Margaret's love for her son is so possessive that he does not want to be near her. As an adult, Michael never visits his family, although his mother claims that she loves him, and that he loves her. He does not come at Christmas Eve, which turns into a quarrel about apples. Ondine reveals the hidden secret about Margaret's abuse of her child; Valerian dismisses the washerwoman and the Yardman for having stolen a few apples, and he dismisses Son for defending Gideon and Thrse.

Margaret's obsessive love of Michael is not only maternal-filial love but also a person-to-person love. With him, she unclothes her naked-self without needing to be pretentious and feels "natural, easy, unafraid (TB, 60), because he is interested in her as an individual, and because she does not need to wear a mask when she in his company. "Iam special to him. Not as a mother, but as a person. Just as he is to me"(TB, 60). Another viewpoint, it is probably that abusive behavior transforms from parents to children, who in turn will become abusing parents in the future. Hence, it is common for Michael to cut off all contact with his sadist mother. He may become a sadist father in the future, because of the pain inflicted upon him during his childhood. Michael, like many children who are abused, grows up feeling guilty, as if he deserved the treatment he received. He ultimately suffers the loss of parents' support, and the loss of a loving home and a safe refuge. Margaret's overrinsing of her hair reveals her unconscious desire for repentance. However, she has to confess the sins she has done against her child, in order to be redeemed. Valerian needs to be purified, so that his soul will be vivified. In the quotation below, Morrison repeats certain expressions to emphasize Valerian's suffering, and to elongate his internal pain:
But not water, please God, may they be blood. I have to cry blood tears for his wounds. But I will need several lives, life after life after life after life, one for each wound, one for every trickle of blood, for every burn. I will need a lifetime of blood tears for each one of them. Lives upon lives upon lives for the the the the the. Hurt. The deep-down eternal little boy hurt. The not knowing when, the never knowing why, and never being able to shape the tongue to speak, let alone the mind to cogitate how the one person in the world upon whom he was totally, completely dependentthe one person he could not even choose not to lovedo that to him. (TB, 234)

Indeed, Margaret physically abuses her child, and Valerian is too preoccupied to notice what is going on. He needs another life to halt his bloody burning tears and wishes his tears turned into blood to purge his indifferent and

careless parenthood. The child abuse becomes a metaphor of American race relation. White capitalists abuse African minority in the same way Margaret abuses her child. To be redeemed, American policies must repent in a way that is analogous to Valerians desire for repentance:
And especially the Americans who were the worst because they were new at the business of defecation spent their whole lives bathing bathing bathing washing away the stench of the cesspools. As though pure soap had anything to do with purity. That was the sole lesson of their world: how to make waste, how to make machines that made more waste, how to make wasteful products, how to talk waste, how to study waste, how to design waste, hoe to cure people who were sickened by waste...how to mobilize waste, legalize waste and how to despise the culture that lived in ... and it would drown them one day, they would all sink into their own waste and the waste they had made of the world and then, finally they would know true peace and the happiness they had been looking for all along. (TB, 203).

In the quotation above, Morrison repeats certain expressions to emphasize the urgent need for repentance. Pure soap is incapable of washing away USAs sins. Morrison portrays USA as a wasteland, where waste becomes the sole principle of life. Therese, the washerwoman, sharply criticizes USA saying, America occurs where there is class/racial discrimination, where the body parts of the poor are medically sold to the rich, where animals are more sympathized with than the life of human beings, where mothers no longer love their children, and where there is human cloning and hermaphrodite. Surrealistically, Son describes USA as an ill-shaped tongue crammed with the corpses of children and the blood of innocent people. Additionally, foster parents, Sydney and Ondine, also fail their adapted daughter, Jadine. She is younger than Michael and does not receive adequate parenting. Both her parents are dead by the time she has been twelve, and her uncle and aunt, Sydney and Ondine, have raised her. Tar Baby is not just about preserving one's cultural heritage but also

about maternal-filial love that bonds a mother with her daughter, as Ondine says to Jadine:
A girl has got to be a daughter first and if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can't never learn how to be a woman good enough even for the respect of other women. You don't need your own natural mother to be a daughter. All you need is to feel a certain way, a certain careful way about people older than you are. (TB, 281)

As Michael who gives nothing back to his parents, so Jadine gives little back to Sydney and Ondine. She feels no obligation to help them, as they get older. Near the end of the novel, Ondine feels aggrieved about the situation. She says to Sydney, I stand on my feet thirty years so she wouldnt have to. And did without so she wouldnt have to (TB, 283). Ondine teaches Jadine not to be ungrateful daughter; a woman is not able to love or become a wife if she does not know how to be a dutiful daughter to her parents; nevertheless, the mothers advice is ignored. Jadine thinks of human bond in terms of money, in that she can pay back Ondine's maternal love. Like Nector, in Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine, who is sent by his mother to boarding schools, Ondine hands to her white master Valerian Street the responsibility for educating Jadine, and he sends her to European schools, which alienate her from her own cultural heritage. Ondine and Sydney are identified too closely with their white employers to the extent that they bring up their niece according to the white culture; consequently, Jadine has little sense of her responsibility as a woman to carry her cultural heritage and keep family. Her foster parents bear some responsibility for this breakdown in her relation with them. Furthermore, the novel portrays the romantic love affair between Jadine and Son, and explores how they can overcome cultural differences. They are two black Americans from very different social backgrounds: Jadine is difficult, seductive, and clever, while Son is anarchic. She is a beautiful fashion model who is sponsored into wealth by the Streets who employ Jadine's aunt and uncle

as servants. Yet, they are stick to each other like the gum. Their struggle represents the struggle confronting black Americans seeking to live and love with integrity in the U.S. Son Green, as the name implies, is a son of earth mother, associated with ancestral heritage and nature. His connection with the sea and trees embodies what Wilfred Cartey calls the "essential ontology of Africa,"xl in which the world of the spirit and nature is alive and gives life to the living,"xli and in which an essential continuity is preserved between earthmother, whose breast provides sustenance to son, and a child who is the son of all Africa. Simultaneously, Son, "son" of earth mother and "son" of Africa, is the character who dramatizes the tension between African values and western culture.xlii Morrison gives the character, Son, a mythical dimension, by associating him with the first black horsemen, who have trampled Isle des Chevaliers. The white people think of the horsemen as French, but to the native islanders, the horsemen are black and also blind. They are the former slaves, who become blind the minute they have seen Dominique (one of the Caribbean islands).They are marooned on the Isle des Chevaliers when the ship, on which they are transported has sunk. The slaves hide from the French, who have returned in search of them. When Son first arrives, Therese thinks he is one of the horsemen. She thinks he has come to rescue Jadine, whom she views as a black woman enslaved by whites. At the end of the novel, Therese urges Son to join the horsemen and become one of them. Thus at the end, Son acquires a kind of mythic status. xliii Morrison renders the landscape mythic, as blind horsemen mate with the swamp women in the trees, rejecting the control of the island by the colonial invaders. xliv Nature becomes a major character in the novel. As Morrison claims in an interview, nature imagery in the novel (such as the moon, the fog, emperor

butterflies, and soldier ants) offers a different perspective on history and human actions, making the scene appear as if the human drama is a transient fragment of the whole picture, in which legend, history, and myth are fused together. The novel suggests unity and harmony, where distinctions between past and present, nature and civilization become meaningless. xlv The legend of the blind horsemen is repeated through the novel and is used as a metaphor for Sons connection to his roots. They are supposedly descendents of slaves who escaped to the island, and thereby evaded the horrors of being subjugated to slavery. The blind horsemen, living in the hills of Isle des Chevaliers, represent the wild man, whose roots are in nature, whereas New Yorkers are the epitomes of urban civilization, individuality, and ambition. Jadine also comes to the island to relax and escape urban living, but her life becomes more complex when she meets Son.xlvi He has a free spirit and does not want to be bound by the civilized world, and by laws that are constructed by white men, yet he is also afraid to become involved in a relationship with a woman he loves. Although Jadine leaves him, he pursues her.xlvii He fears his deeply involved relationship with Jadine that may result in failure. xlviii She is diametrically opposed to his way of thinking, yet he cannot resist loving her. Therefore, what he needs is to confront this intense love and let it happen rather than continue to live life as if he had never met her. xlix It remains unclear whether he joins the legendary horsemen, or whether he succeeds in finding his love, Jadine. Son and Therese are in a boat headed toward Isle des Chevaliers. Therese, the blind, shamanistic, old woman, believes that Son belongs to nature, not to urbanity and not to a woman who has no respect for traditional values. On reaching the shore, Son goes toward the trees and starts running. Therese knows that Jadine has lost her ancient properties, and Son must forget her. A descendant of the "blind race," Therese also knows how to detach Son (Brer

Rabbit) from Jadine (Tar Baby), who experiences the panic of a female Brer Rabbit.l However, there is a hint that indicates that he may return to Jadine. He goes to New York, and Jadine joins him there.li Moreover, Morrisons novels highlight the dangers of assimilation and integration. She wants to tell the readers that women cannot find love without loving themselves and each other first, and that it is only after the character achieves a sense of self-acceptance and self-love, she/he gets exactly what s/he wants.lii In spite of the celebration of Black is Beautiful rhetoric, which characterized the 1960s, Morrison begins to critique black communities for their perpetuation of western beliefs and ideals, which stunt the development of black people, in general, and black women, in particular; in the sense that black community adopts two dangerous concepts: physical beauty and romantic love.liii The tensions between Jadine and Son indicate that blackness is not a static essence but contains differences that are as intractable as differences between members of separate races.liv Jadine is dressed in a canary yellow dress and is named copper Venus on the cover of magazines. As a magazine casual, Jadine becomes half-white and halfblack. Notably there is the issue of how the media constructs western beauty as a universal standard. Pecola Breedlove in Morrisons first novel, The Bluest Eye, points the way to Jadine in Tar Baby. Both accept a western valuation of beauty, although for opposite reasons: Pecola, a dark-skinned black girl, because she cannot approach the cultural imperative, and Jadine, a light skinned black, because she can embody the image on Parisian fashion runways. lv Morrison demonstrates that the dominant culture destroys African Americans' self-image. African Americans' self-image is also destroyed by the dominant culture's

promotion of its own standard of beauty: blue eyes, keen nose, thin lips, red cheeks, and long, silky, blond hair.lvi Jadine is described as an ethereal being with her "many-colored sandals pressing gold tracks on the floor. Her beauty is "transcendent" and "unphtographable" (TB, 47). She wants to strip her identity off racial and national titles, simply showing off her naked self: I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? What will happen when he finds out that Idon't want to straighten my hairI want to get out of my skin and be the only person insideNot Americannot blackjust me? "(TB, 47). The black stranger, Son, is a chocolate man who eats all the chocolate in Ondine's kitchen, "the chocolate eating man was a lover" (TB, 111). It is only in the last chapter that Son's history is revealed. His father is called Old Man. Son's name in the social security card is William Green. He adopts several documented and undocumented identities; the other selves are just fabrications to protect him. He drives the car into the bed, where his wife is lying with her teenage boyfriend. He is connected with the smell of human afterbirth that stands for regeneration. Filled with desperate rage, Son makes Jadine feel that her denial of black heritage and her family is disgusting. Desperately in love, Son wants to rescue Jadine from the white world and brings her back to Eloe. He wants to transform her and disrupt her existence by imposing his insinuations onto her psyche through spiritual intrusions into her dreams.67 He attempts "to breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency" (TB, 102). Andrew W. A. LaVallee suggests the idea of the "race traitor" conflict; central to this idea is the disassociation from, and racist perspective on the traitor's race of ethnic group."lvii It is the conflict of a woman, who discards her ancestral heritage and culture to adopt another, trying to reconcile herself to the "night women who want to bring back the prodigal daughter. Jadine, on the other hand, wants to rescue Son from what she

perceives to be his "white-folks-black-folks primitivism" (TB, 275). She attempts to acculturate him according to the values of the white dominant culture:
The night women were not merely against her (and her alonenot him), not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement with each other about her, and were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits. (TB, 262)

Jadine willingly embraces the white culture. During a final confrontation, she feels that she is fighting not Son but the diaspora mothers, who have seduced him. She knows herself to be inauthentic when she sees the woman in yellow with the tar-colored skin, spits at her. The woman in yellow, the horsemen, and the diaspora mothers stand for the black roots, ancestral heritage, and history. They are foil to Jadines cosmopolitanism. Karin Luisa Badt explains that Jadine fears being cast as a representative of her race, joining its "fraternity."lviii She rejects the "ancient properties" of African culture that Son and the diaspora mothers embody. The black diaspora mothers are speaking with one voice, calling Son and Jadine to join them, in order to know their ancestral history.lix In most of Morrisons novels, there is a traumatic loss: in Tar Baby, the loss of a female tradition and in Beloved amnesia regarding three hundred years of slavery. lx Jadine operates as a tar baby in multiple ways. Through her sexual allure, Son is deeply attracted to her and cannot get her out of his mind, but she also brings people together, accomplishing this not through love but by her ability to converse with people across race and class lines. The more contact they have, the more deeply he gets involved with her. She entraps Son since she is the creation of white culture and tempts him to abandon his own black heritage.

While she is connected by blood ties to Sydney and Ondine, her French education and career link her to the leisure enjoyed by the Streets. By contrast, Son is portrayed as fundamentally attuned to his African American roots. He tells the story of the tar baby when he taunts Jadine. She is roused to fury by it because she discerns the interpretation Son is putting on the story. She is the tar baby, who is created by a white farmer (the reference is to Valerian, who has paid for her education) to trap the rabbit (Son) who has been eating the farmers cabbages (Son has stolen some food from Valerian). The Tar metaphor is presented in the episode, in which Jadine nearly sinks into the tarlike substance near the swamps.lxi Jadines efforts to extricate herself from the pit are overseen by women in the trees:
They were delighted when first they saw her, thinking a runaway child had been restored to them. Nevertheless, upon looking closer they saw differently. This girl was fighting to get away from them. The women hanging in the trees were quiet now, but arrogant -- mindful as they were of their value, their exceptional femaleness; knowing as they did that they alone could hold together the stones of pyramids and the rushes of Moses's crib; knowing their steady consistency, they wondered at the girl's desperate struggle down below to be free, to be something other than they were.

(TB, 183)

Though Jadine is likened to the tar baby in the folktale, she fails to become a true daughter of the African tradition. There is a touch of magic realism in Tar Baby, such as the scene of the diaspora mothers and the Island trees. When Son and Jade run out of gas while returning from the beach, Son goes to get gas and Jade heads for the shade of some trees, and is sucked in by tar. As she tries to inch her way out, the mythical women in the trees look down.lxii By means of personification, the Island trees where Jadine falls in the mudhole are depicted as a lover. "Cling to your partner, hang on to him, and never let him go. Creep up on him a millimeter at a time, slower than the slime and cover him like the moss" and "love him and trust him with your life because you are up to your kneecaps in rot" (TB, 183). The trees, representing the mother of nature, resemble the ghosts of diaspora mothers, in Eloe, that remind Jadine

of her original nature as a woman. Being a model of a new liberal woman, Jadine cannot identify the trees dancing with her, denying her feminine instincts as well as her ancestors history.lxiii In a magic realistic scene, Jadine encounters the spirits of diaspora mothers and her dead mother in a daydream, holding their breasts and pushing them out. She does not understand that the breasts are a symbol of womens responsibility to nurture the community. The diaspora mothers represent the dead ancestors as well as Jadine's womanhood, or the naked self she is trying to rebuff: She was scared of being still; of not being busy, scared to have to be quiet, scared to have children alone. She kept barking at [Son] about equality, sexual equality as though he thought women were inferior"(TB, 268). In Morrisons fiction, the female character's body is literally transformed to highlight the problematic position of the female body in the postmodern fiction. Jadine represents the myth of the new or the liberal woman, who imitates the western standards of beauty, who is independent, and who is working outside home.lxiv The diaspora mothers are telling Jadine that woman, however educated she may be, is in need to be a mother and a wife raising a family of her own, and that school is not the only place where one can receive education; that is to say, life is the real school to learn from. Son wants Jadine to admit her black culture, to be a free woman, and to have her own children instead of taking care of the "white folks' children"(TB, 269). Son thinks of establishing a committed love relationship with Jadine:
So it would be his duty to keep the climate mild for her, to hold back with his hands if need be the thunder, and he would blow with his own lips a gentle enough breeze for her to tinkle in. The bird-like defenselessness he had loved while she slept and saw when she took his hands on the stairs was his to protect. He would have to be alert, feed her with his mouth if he had to, construct a world of steel and down for her to flourish in, for the love thing was already there. He had been looking for her all his life .Staring at a heartred tree desperately in love with a woman he could not risk loving because he

could not afford to lose her. For if he loved and lost this woman whose sleeping face was the limit his eyes could safely behold and whose wakened face threw him into confusion, he would surely lose the world. So he made himself disgusting to her. Insulted and offended her. Gave her sufficient cause to help him keep his love in chains and hoped to God the lock would hold. It snapped like a string. (TB, 220) And: Gradually [Jade] came to feel unorphaned. He cherished and safeguarded her. No part of her was hidden from him. She wondered if she should hold back, keep something in store from him . There was nothing to forgive, nothing to win ... They were the last lovers in New York City-the first in the world-so their passion was inefficient and kept no savings account. (TB, 229)

Morrison admits that the search for love and identity is what she intends in almost everything she writes, and that she is interested in how men are educated, how women relate to each other, and how blacks are able to love. lxv She pictures the psychology of love. Falling in love with Jadine, Son wishes that he can achieve the impossible for her welfare, that he will protect her, that she is part of the self, that he is willing to challenge the most deadly jeopardizes for her sake, that he gives priority to her happiness, and that losing her means losing life itself. Love is a rescue from the threatening life of loneliness. Sons love to Jadine makes him a newborn man: "[T]his heavy grown-up love made him feel fresh-born, unprecedented, surrounded by an extended present loaded with harm" (TB, 218). Hence, when falling in love, everything outside the realm of the two lovers seems "ridiculous, maimed, or unhappy to them" (TB, 220). They are so occupied with each other that they see nothing beyond their horizon. Love, tolerance, mutual admiration, trust, and devotion are needed. A true lover shows a desire for communication, pouring her/his secret out to the partner; nevertheless, language is not the only means of communication between lovers. Their language may diminish into special codes, such as eye contact and

facial expressions. True lovers trust each other to the extent that they exchange their private secrets, dreams, and even unspeakable sins to each other. By means of personification, Morrison describes Jadine's world of industry, as well as the postmodern age, like the ant kingdom where there is no time for dreaming and procreation, and where there is time only for working. When new soldier ants are needed, the queen urges the sperms from a private place, where they are kept when she has the last copulation. The male ant dies after having emptied his sperm into his lady-love,"(TB, 291) while the queen keeps the sperms in a safe place to be used at her discretion. This scene describes the postmodern world as a sterile world, where things do not take their natural course, and where artificial insemination substitutes natural copulation. Not able to adapt to the quiet life in Eloe, Jadine leaves Son and returns to New York. The lovers strive to hold and understand each other; she perceives his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom; he perceives her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him. Jadine lives the fashionable life in Paris and New York City. When Jadine arrives in Eloe, Florida, she is unable to appreciate its values. She finds the small town claustrophobic and does not respond warmly to its people. Nor does Jadine respond to the maternal love of Aunt Rosa, who calls her daughter. Eloe is the place Son calls home. It is a town where his family and longstanding friends live. He is fond of his fatherthe relationship between Son and Old Man being the only example in the book of a fruitful parent/offspring relationshipand his Aunt Rosa. The settings in Tar Baby mirror Jadines feelingson the island, she feels like a child. In Manhattan, she feels like a whole personone who can do and be anything. When she gives in to Sons request to visit Eloe, her deep-seated insecurities emerge. She decides to leave, for she is not ready to face her inner

self, so she runs away not from Son or Eloe but from herself.lxvi The setting of the novel remains Isle des Chevaliers until the sixth chapter, and then there is a shift to New York. In the eighth chapter, the focus shifts back to the island to the lives of Sydney, Ondine, and the Streets. In the ninth chapter, Son and Jadine reach Eloe. In the tenth and eleventh chapters, the action returns to Queen of France and Isle des Chevaliers.lxvii These two locations clash with each. Jadine also comes to the island to relax and escape urban living, but her life becomes more complex when she meets Son.lxviii Nevertheless, love is more powerful than rage or flout. When falling in love, one must endure and find an excuse for her/his beloved's rage: "When you have fallen in love, rage is superfluous; insult impossible. You mumble "bitch," but the hunger never moves, never closes"(TB, 46).True love endures the hardness of life. Therefore, Son hopefully does not yield and looks after her. He remains emotionally attached to her even though she leaves him.lxix His committed love to Jadine urges him to ask her for marriage. Vivian Gornick thinks that, in British and American societies, the choice between marriage and passion no longer creates tension, and consequently love does not push a woman or a man to the point where that "suffering which brings clarity and insight" becomes operative. Gornick thinks that love may be a cultural phenomenon, but serene marriage is a consequence of love.lxx As for beauty, Nelson Hippolite relates the lack of communication and the disability to see beauty to absent-mindedness and the lack of ponder. lxxi Morrisons black characters respond differently to western standards of beauty. Sandra Lee Bartky argues that the construction of feminine beauty is race, or class specific, and that there is little evidence if women of color are less committed to the ideal beauty than the more privileged white women. lxxii As Paul C. Taylor argues, beauty is racialized and is defined in terms of white beauty. This can clearly be seen in the ways black women characters in

Morrisons novels suffer when they attempt to conform to western standards of beauty. Consequently, in trying to conform to the ideal white beauty, the black women characters despise their blackness, which in turn leads to self-hatred. However, not all the black characters adore western standards of beauty. Morrison's novels show black people who are aware of the danger of adopting western standards of beauty.lxxiii Colors, numbers, names, and flower imagery, are significant symbols and constitute part of the beauty of language in Morrison's fiction. Morrison criticizes the notion that whiteness is associated with beauty, cleanliness, and sterility. In contrast, color is associated with happiness, most clearly in the rainbow of yellow, green, and purple. She uses color imagery to emphasize the destructiveness of the black communitys privileging of whiteness, and to suggest that vibrant color, rather than the pure absence of color, is a strong image of happiness and freedom. Moreover, when Son jumps, in the opening chapter of the novel, on the back of the dock, he plucks fruits from the twelve miniature orange trees to eat. Orange tree is symbolically associated with innocence, eternal love, marriage, and fruitfulness. If the numerals of number 12 are collected, the result will be three that means symbolically glueyness, which reinforces the meaning of the title of the novel.lxxiv Flowers, in general, are the best symbols of beauty and love. In the "Foreword," Son states that the end of the world is where there is only sterility. Parrots and peacocks, as symbols of fertility, fly away looking for another refugethe clouds and river change their courses. He prophesizes the end of the world when everything turns upside down, and when the beauty of nature is no more permanentonly the champion daisy tree (TB, 9) remains serene. The champion daisy trees refer to Sons African roots. Morrison personifies the old warriors, who stand for

the valor of the ancestral soldiers, and who lie serene with "diamondbacks" (TB, 9) sleeping in their graves, like the daisy tree that stands for innocence, loyal love, and purity. They become "scheduled for eternity (TB, 9) even after the end of the world. Morrison connects the beauty of nature with the heroic deeds and the history of old ancestors, emphasizing that history is as beautiful as the beauty of nature. Accordingly, daisy is also connected with the character Margaret. The daisy tree is also called "Herb Margaret. lxxv According to an ancient Celtic legend, daisies came from the spirits of children who died at birth. Thus, daisy ironically foreshadows the absence of Margarets son. She always ingests mango. In Hinduism, mango is a symbol of attainment and fertility, weddings and celebrations.lxxvi Margaret wants to prepare an old-fashioned family Christmas, in which there are turkey, apple pie, and pumpkin. Ironically, her demand for turkey symbolizes the American holiday of thanksgiving, her desire for family gatherings and harmony, her romanticizing of the ancestral heritage, and her nostalgia for the past. Similarly, her demand for apple pie is an American symbol of maternal nurturing.lxxvii Symbolized by his name, Valerian bespeaks of aristocratic pretensions in being named after a Roman Emperor; however, the name Valerian also possesses sinister significance. Valerian is associated with the valerian flower, which is mentioned in the Bible as the spiky flowers, whose roots are used in making sedatives. Sedation appears to be one of its true and ancient properties, to invoke the standard Morrison adopted in dedicating the novel to her female progenitors and relations. lxxviii Valerian plants flowers, such as dahlias and hydrangeas, in the greenhouse. For him, there is only disorder and meaninglessness in the outside world; therefore, he keeps all his time inside the greenhouse in which he settles on Bach and Chopin for germination, Hadny and

Liszt for sprouting. Music is confined to the greenhouse. The dahlia flower is symbolically associated with dignity, elegance, and romantic love.lxxix Peach blossoms also stand for the decaying of Valerian's desire to regain health, hope, and his desire for a strong family bond. According to ancient legends, peach blossom is an enduring symbol of family gathering and warm atmosphere.lxxx In addition, Jadine or Jade stands for happiness and future. Her name is associated with the Jade plant, known as a friendship tree, which has the capacity to spread joy and happiness in friendship relationships. She always wears yellow dress, which is the color of happiness.lxxxi Son's name is archetypal. It stands for USAs native son. He helps Valerian to have the sick plant buds bloomed. Son assimilates green plants to women in the sense that women and plants need love and care. He is the only one who calls the yardman and washerwoman by their real nameTherese and Gideon. Sons appetite for drinking chocolate indicates love and his desire for an intimate communication. Chocolate is a symbol of love and happiness.lxxxii The avocado tree growing near the Streets' home stands for passionate love and beauty.lxxxiii As for the name of the island, Morrison uses the French word "L'arbre de la croix" meaning, the tree of the crossthe dogwood or lynching. According to legend, the dogwood is the size of the oak tree, and is chosen as the timber for the cross, during the Crucifixion of Christ. Distressed for being used for a cruel purpose, Jesus being nailed told the tree, "because of your regret and pity for my suffering, never again shall the dogwood tree grow large enough to be used as a cross.lxxxiv Augustine Duru explores the meaning of the cross and the dogwood tree for the black American Christians. The lynching lives in the collective psyche of USA both black and white. It has great

implications for the legacy of race relations in USA.lxxxv The cross/lynching tree symbol also has a communal meaning. It means the liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressors. Duru presumes, for the liberal blacks, the meaning of the cross and the dogwood tree represents more than redemption and becomes a recurring theme in black experience.lxxxvi Reienhold Niebuhr assumes that both the cross and the lynching tree are ugly barnacles, yet there is something beautiful about them calling it the terrible beauty of the cross.lxxxvii In the light of what James Cone says, Morrison must have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy.lxxxviii Hence, the novelist tries to find an analogy between the pain of Jesus on the cross and the dark periods in the history of blacks. Tar Baby does not have a clear conclusion. As Barbara Christian writes, " [It is] a simple story becoming increasingly complex, mythic, beyond solution .lxxxix It concludes with a sense of hope.xc The daisy trees are associated with Son's return to his origin: "After thirty years of shame the champion daisy trees were marshaling for war. The wild parrots could feel menace in the creeping of their roots," and the trees stepped back a bit as if to make the way easier for a certain kind of man, with the fugitive running [L]ickety-split. Licketysplit. Looking neither to the left nor to the right. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Lickety-lickety-licketysplit, to join the blind chevaliers who race those horses like angels all over the hills (TB, 274, 305,306). The term that sums up the novel, "Lickety-Split," represents the sound of the rabbit and of the horsemen to signify Son's freedom in the end. Like Brer Rabbit, Son, the black man, is a figure with the power to survive. xci The novel opens and ends with two contradictory images, symmetrically shifting from a dream of safety to the real sound of the running feet of the swimmer. In short, Morrison requires that her novels be regarded as unfinished texts, not completed works. Son is running toward his destiny, whether it is

Jadine or the black horsemen who ride free through the hills. He is running toward his unknown fate just as Brer Rabbit running from his enemy Brer Fox and from the Tar Baby. In Tar Baby, Toni Morrison deals with the issue of romantic love connecting it with issues, such as racism and African folklore, and showing how love deteriorates, as in the case of Son and Jadine, because of the noxious impact of assimilation to the American mainstream society. Nevertheless, the novel ends with a glimpse of hope, in that true love can withstand obstacles. In the next novel, Beloved, Morrison addresses the issue of maternal love, connecting it with racism, showing how the family ties go into the abyss, because of slavery and racism, and displaying the impact of assimilation to the American mainstream society in the novel.

Philip Page, Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels (NY: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 82.
ii

J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (NY: MJF Books, 1949), 85, 89. Ibid.

iii

Random House, "Tar Baby," Feb.12, 1999, http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index. pperl?date19990212 (accessed Oct.1, 2011). Anniina Jokinen, "The Inauthentic Tar Baby: An Essay on Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, May 1, 1997, http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/taressay.htm (accessed July17, 2011).
vi

iv

Ron David, Toni Morrison Explained (NY: Random House, Inc., 2000), 100. Ibid.

vii

Morrison, Tar Baby (NY: Vintage Books, 1981), xii. All subsequent references to the novel are from the 2004 edition and will be cited parenthetically in the dissertation. Barbara Christian, "Toni Morrison: Our Saving Grace," May, 1997, http://garnet. berkeley.edu:3333/.mags/.cross/.38/.black/.bmorris.html (accessed June 23, 2012).
ix

viii

Joyce Hope Scott, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby: The Subversive Role of Language and the Carnivalesque, in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, ed., Justine Tally (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38.
xi

Ibid., 29, 33.

Dana A. Williams, Contemporary African American Women Writers, in The Cambridge Companion to African American Womens Literature, ed., Angelyn Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 72, 74, 268.
xiii

xii

Ibid. Ibid. Christian, 2.

xiv

xv

xvi

Toni Morrison, The Guardian, Jan. 29, 1992.

Lars Eckstein, "A love supreme: jazzthetic strategies in Toni Morrison's Beloved," In African American Review, FindArticles.com, 12 July 2011, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m2838/is_2_40/ai_n16832496/ (accessed June13, 2010).
xviii

xvii

Ibid.

Esti Sugiharti, "Racialised Beauty: Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye," http://ehlt. flinders.edu.au/projects/counterpoints/PDF/A14.pdf (accessed Apr. 23, 2011). Wikipedia, s.v. "Tar Baby," Nov.10, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar Baby _(novel) (accessed June 23, 2012).
xxi xx

xix

Joyce Hope Scott, 42.

Rebirth Africa, "African Masks: History, and Meaning," http://www.rebirth.co.za/ african_mask_history_and_meaning.htm (accessed Mar. 27, 2011). Harold Bloom, ed., Blooms Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison (NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 157.
xxiv xxiii

xxii

Ibid.

Judi Clark, Review of Tar Baby, Mostlyfiction.com, http://bookreviewmostly fiction.com (accessed Sept. 7, 2000).
xxvi

xxv

Ibid. Bloom, 152. Juice, 3.

xxvii

xxviii

Kathleen Brown, et al., Changes in Self-esteem in Black and White Girls between the Ages of 9 and 14 Years: The NHLBI Growth and Health Study, in Journal of Adolescent Health 23(1998): 8.
xxx

xxix

Ibid. Ibid. Joyce Hope Scott, 38. Brown, et al., 8.

xxxi

xxxii

xxxiii

xxxiv

Joyce Hope Scott, 43. Ibid.

xxxv

Kurt Vonnegut, "Majority of Parents Abuse Children, Children Report," in The Onion, 43, No.15 (Apr.13, 2007):1. Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, Crossing Borders through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 72.
xxxviii xxxvii

xxxvi

Ibid.

xxxix

Williams, 72, 74, 268.

xl

Stephanie Li, Toni Morrison: A Biography (NY: Greenwood Press, 2010), 64. Ibid. Ibid.

xli

xlii

Yogita Goyal, The Gender of Diaspora in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 2 (Summer 2006):400.
xliv

xliii

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 62. Ibid.,12. Ibid.,59. Ibid.,50.

xlv

xlvi

xlvii

xlviii

xlix

Billingslea-Brown, 73. Ibid., 12, 49, 50.

li

John N. Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (NY: Palgrave, 2000), 100.
liii

lii

Ibid. Scott, 45.

liv

Andrew W. A. LaVallee, "'Faces as Black as His but Smug'-The Race Traitor in Morrison's Tar Baby," http://ocaxp1.cc.oberlin.edu/~alavalle/morrison.html (accessed May1, 1997).
lvi

lv

Ibid.

Carolyn C. Denard, Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: An Interview with Toni Morrison," in Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall 1998):1.
lviii

lvii

Ibid.,2.

lix

Goyal, 400. Ibid.

lx

Laurie Ann Nardone, "The Body Shop: The Politics and Poetics of Transformation (Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, Katherine Dunn, Harry Crews, Fay Weldon, Angela Carter)" (PhD diss.: Emory University, 1997), 67.
lxii

lxi

Vonnegut, 5. Ibid.

lxiii

Toni Morrison, A Study Guide: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (Chicago: Steppenwolf's Arts Exchange, 2007), 30. J. Brooks Bouson, Defecating over a Whole People: The Politics of Shame and the Failure of Love in Tar Baby, in Quiet as its Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Tony Morrison (NY: Sunny Press, 2000), 6.
lxvi lxv

lxiv

Joyce Hope Scott, 47. Diane Sauder, ed., Tar Baby: Pink Monkey Notes (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2007),

lxvii

58.
lxviii

Ibid., 62.

Eqi.org, "Emotionally Abusive Mothers, July, 2007, http://eqi.org/eam1.htm (accessed Apr. 23, 2011). Kelly Kettering, The Lack of Ponder, Ohio University Art Galleries Notes, Jan.29, 2009, http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=62160568080 (accessed June 17, 2011).
lxx

lxix

Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, eds., Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 64, 72. Paul C. Taylor, Malcolms Conk and Dantos Colors; or Four Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty, and Aesthetics, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, No. 1 (1999), 17. Pinkie D'Cruz, "Meanings & Legends of Flowers (V)," Suite101.com, Jan. 16, 1998, http://www.suite101.com/content/christmas-symbols-and-their-meanings-a171959 (accessed Mar. 31, 2011).
lxxiv lxxiii lxxii

lxxi

Ibid. Wikipedia, s.v. Mango, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango (accessed Apr.1,

lxxv

2011). Demand Media, "Fertility Symbols," in Essortment.com, http://www.essortmen. com/fertility-symbols-54533.htm (accessed Apr. 1, 2011).
lxxvii lxxvi

2010,

D'Cruz, 1.

Kathleen Karlsen, " Find Your Flower: Flower Symbols and Meanings, " Living Arts Enterprises, Sept. 21, 2010, http://www.livingartsoriginals.com/nfoflowerisymbolismhtm (accessed Mar. 31, 2011). Judaism 101,"The Doorwofly to Signs and Symbolic Meanings: Chinese Symbol for Longevity," Whats-your-sign.com, http://www.whats-your-sign.com/chinese-symbol-forlongevity. html (accessed Apr.19, 2011). Sheila-Ann Bender, "Friendship Symbols and Their Meaning," in Helium.com, Mar. 05, 2008, http://www.helium.com/items/900314-friendship-symbols-and-their-meaning (accessed Mar. 31, 2011). Marion Boddy-Evans, "Symbols Dictionary: Love," About.com Guide, http://painting. about.com/cs/inspiration/a/symbolslove.htm (accessed Apr. 2, 2011). Forest Generation, "The Tree of Passionate Love Stories Lives for Centuries," http://www.forestgeneration.com/avocado.html (accessed Apr.9, 2011).
lxxxiii lxxxii lxxxi lxxx lxxix

lxxviii

D'Cruz, 15.

Augustine Duru, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree: Union of Symbol and Meaning in James Cones Soteriology of the Cross," in Symposium, 2009, http://www.visualforces.com/ christian/photography/nature/the-dogwood/ (accessed Apr.1, 2011).
lxxxv

lxxxiv

James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 54.

Reienhold Niebuhr, The Terrible Beauty of the Cross, in The Christina Century, Mar. 21, 1929, http://www.theafricanamericanlectionary.org/PopupCulturalAid.asp?LRID=126 (accessed Jan. 10, 2011).
lxxxvii

lxxxvi

Ibid.

Magills Choice, ed., American Ethnic Writes, rev.ed. (California: Salem Press, Inc, 2009), 806. Denard, Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: An Interview with Toni Morrison," 1. Yonghee Moon, "Rootedness," Paraphrase Online Internet, http://www.acsu.buffalo. edu/~yongmoon/root.html (accessed May1, 1997).
xci xc lxxxix

lxxxviii

Magills Choice, 807.